A Comparative Study of Chinese and Thai Animal “Chicken” Metaphor from a Cognitive Perspective

Abstract

Conceptual Metaphors are one of cognitive models grounded in our bodily experience. Animals as one of most important creatures that are intimately exposed to human beings lay a foundation of the perception and understanding of human beings towards the objective world. Interestingly, several linguistic phenomena are related to ‘Chicken’metaphorsin the Chinese and Thai languages. Humanbeings and chickens have been interacting since ancient times.Chickens were long included as one of totems in animal zodiacs of China and Thailandso that numerous chicken-related metaphorical expressions are used in both Chinese and Thai, as affected by their specific social and cultural factors. This paper aims at investigating Chinese and Thai animal “Chicken” metaphor from cognitive and cross-cultural perspectives within the theoretical framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Kövecses, 2002).By a systematically comparative study, results were that the existence of similarities and differences of culturalfigurative meaningreflected in different socio-cultural contexts.